Running a Net Radio Station With Open-Source Software

Seven Linux enthusiasts decided that it would be cool to broadcast their own radio show over the Internet.

Five great minds got together and decided
that broadcasting over the Internet would be cool—plain and
simple. Five great minds quickly turned to seven and an Internet
radio station at
http://www.opensourceradio.com/
was born. The open-source Community has made this internet radio
station possible by supplying all the software components. Two main
hardware components are necessary to broadcast on the Internet: a
broadcast server and an encoder client. It is not a requirement to
separate the server and the client, they can be run on the same
machine, but we chose to use two different systems at two different
locations to generate our output.

We play MP3-encoded material during our radio show. LAME and
Liveice convert the audio output to MP3-encoded specifications so
anyone with xmms or Winamp can decode our signal. Broadcasting
MP3-encoded material at this time does not require any licensing,
however it is anticipated that in the year 2001 royalties will be
collected by the agency holding the patent. You can obtain more
information regarding these issues at www.mp3licensing.com. If the
company that holds the patent imposes royalties, we plan to move to
a different encode, decode schema. Ogg Vorbis is a patent and
royalty-free compressed audio formatter that we anticipate moving
our broadcast server to in the near future. Ogg Vorbis is available
at www.xiph.org. Also, the
MP3 licensing does not cover issues regarding broadcasting
copyrighted material to a public audience so if you plan to run an
Internet radio station, be certain you have permission to broadcast
anything for which you do not hold the copyright.

We use standard hardware because we found quickly that
obscure components introduce unnecessary delays in the setup
process. The rest of this article details the setup of each
component in our internet radio station. We also describe any
problems that we encountered along the way. Please understand that
there are a million ways to create an internet radio station, and
the choices we made were not due to any alliance with any
vendor—we simply made it work in the following mannner.

Figure 1 gives an overview of our network that starts when it
gets our voices to an MP3 player. We speak into microphones, the
microphones convert our voice to analog and the mixer condenses the
stream into the line-in on the encoder client that runs Liveice.
Liveice picks up the stream and uses LAME to convert our voice from
analog to digital. Liveice then sends our digitized stream out onto
the Internet to our defined broadcast server that runs Icecast.
Icecast takes the incoming stream and broadcasts it onto the
Internet at both the destination and port
www.opensourceradio.com:8000. Once it is on the Internet, any
decoding client, such as an MP3 player, can pick up the stream and
decode our digital stream to audio output.

Figure 1. Internet Radio Station Network
Overview

Server Requirements

We wanted to succeed right away so we acquired a domain,
static IP and a server with open ports. A static IP and domain are
not necessary, but by making everything static we don't need to
inform our listener base every time our ISP changes our IP. We also
connected our server to the Internet via a T1. This gives us the
bandwidth to provide high-quality broadcasting. Our broadcast
server, Linux3 and our static IP are provided by
www.doitwebcorp.com. The server is a standard networked PC running
Red Hat Linux 6.2.

Server Setup

We started by downloading the Icecast server software from
www.icecast.org. We chose to use version 1.3.7 because it was
considered the most stable release available at the time. We used
the default installation that locates the binaries in
/usr/local/icecast. The configuration of the Icecast server is very
simple, you only need to change one file. The icecast.conf file is
very informative. The sections we changed allow the encoder client
to send streaming audio to the broadcast server that will be
serving to the Internet. Our server is set up with the IP address
63.101.145.11 with the registered domain of
www.opensourceradio.com. If you compare the default icecast.conf
file to our example icecast.conf file, you will see the fields that
we changed. This is only a portion of the icecast.conf file, as it
is a very large file.

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